What keeps me busy at the moment.

Day to day, my primary focus is finding my next design role. I’m taking a deliberate, grounded approach rather than firing off CVs into the void.

I’m looking for a calm, intentional team—ideally remote, though the right in-house team is just as welcome. What matters most to me is environment: low-friction cultures that value deep focus, respect asynchronous communication, and know that quality design comes from thoughtful problem-solving rather than frantic, back-to-back meetings.

Between applications, I've been building the small apps I wish already existed. Each one removes a step I was tired of repeating, and each one has taught me a new toolchain along the way. I wrote about the thinking behind the first two in Tiny Tools, Less Friction .

• Auto Folder Creator : a Windows desktop app that builds a project's folders, brief and job number in one keystroke. It's the grown-up version of my old Caps Lock + D script.
• Vault Capture : an Android app that drops tasks and links straight into my Obsidian vault, including from the Share sheet.
• Folder Tidy : the newest one. A Windows app that clears out empty folders, sorts finished downloads into the right place and lets me undo any of it. It's built and in daily use, and I'm still polishing it before it goes public.

Next up is getting the code tidy enough to publish, and working out which annoyance gets an app next.

When focus is finite, small paper cuts in your setup drain your bandwidth before you even touch real work. Lately, I’ve been applying strict rules to protect my working memory and attention:

• Decluttering the Digital Field: Stripping out unused apps, dead bookmarks, and 40-tag folder trees that inevitably fail. Moving toward flat directories, a single drop inbox, and fast search so my digital desk is as clean as my physical workspace.
• Batching Over Infinite Scrolling: Putting strict time boundaries on job boards and feeds to kill search fatigue and protect hyperfocus for actual design problems.
• Analog Buffer First: Catching ideas and scratchpad logic in a pocket dot-grid notebook before reaching for a screen. Paper carries zero notification traps.
• The Sensory Shield: Using active noise cancellation and familiar soundscapes to mute ambient household and street static whenever I need deep focus.

Moving Away from Hypervisor Bloat: I’m planning a move away from Proxmox. While it served its purpose, managing complex virtualization and nested containers stopped being fun and turned into an administrative chore. I’m currently planning a simple, bare-metal server build to keep running costs down and maintenance minimal—tools should serve you, not demand weekend maintenance.

3D Printing Pause: 3D printing has come to a temporary halt. I’ve outgrown my current setup and am weighing up whether to invest in a more reliable, low-maintenance printer later down the line.

The Air-Gapped Keychain Station: Completed my emergency USB-C rescue drive. Half is partitioned for Ventoy live environments, and the rest hosts an air-gapped terminal dashboard with local offline documentation so I’m never stranded by connectivity hiccups.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Diving into Project Hail Mary. It’s hard science fiction at its most engaging: a lone astronaut waking up with amnesia on a desperate, one-way interstellar mission, forced to science his way out of catastrophic problems one controlled experiment at a time.

Weir nails that methodical, iterative problem-solving loop where panic is set aside in favour of testing hypotheses, building bespoke tools out of whatever is at hand, and documenting findings. It’s practical, brilliant, and completely engrossing.

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